Scare Me

by Teri Terry

Scare Me is a tense supernatural thriller, perfect for fans of One of Us Is Lying and This Lie Will Kill You. From the award-winning author of the SLATED and CIRCLE trilogies, Teri Terry.

The past can haunt you...

Sixteen-year-old Liv can't get on with her own life - not as long as the ghost of her twin sister, Molly, who died at birth, has been her constant companion: she is always there, a part of her that no one else can see or hear.

Liv meets a boy called Echo, who is searching for the truth about his mother's death, and despite Molly's concerns, Liv is drawn to him. Echo believes that if he can just speak to his mother's ghost, he will finally learn the truth about what happened to her and be able to move on with his life.

But he believes the way to reach her is through fear: to scare himself enough to lift the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead. Echo and Liv begin an increasingly dangerous game that tests their greatest fears: but how far is Echo willing to go to uncover the truth?

Genres: Young Adult

448 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2023

About the author

Teri has lived in France, Canada, Australia and England at more addresses than she can count, acquiring three degrees, a selection of passports and a silly name along the way. Past careers have included scientist, lawyer, optometrist, and, in England, various jobs in schools, libraries and an audiobook charity. The footpaths and canal ways of the Buckinghamshire Chilterns where she now lives inspired much of the setting of Slated. She hates broccoli, likes cats, and has finally worked out what she wants to do when she grows up.

Facebook fan page: http://www.facebook.com/TeriTerryAuthor
Notes from the Slushpile: group blog on writing for children http://notesfromtheslushpile.blogspot...

**IMPORTANT: Please do not message me on Goodreads with requests for review copies, swag, interviews, or anything else. See the contact section of my website for that. Messages on Goodreads may (and probably will) go unanswered!**

Reviews

[Hayley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read a Teri Terry book before, so I have no frame of reference, however this is a great YA novel.

We meet Liv, who is a twin. However, her twin (Molly) passed away at birth, but she never left Liv. She has been there in the background interfering with her life. Liv would like Molly to move on, but Molly is determined to stay. She meets a boy called Echo. Echo's mother drove her car (with him in it) off a cliff a year before meeting Liv. He can't remember much about the accident, but he wants to contact his mother to ask what happened. He can't believe that she would have done what she did with him in the car.

Echo and Liv decide that in order to face their ghosts, they need to waken the barrier between the living and the dead. In order to do this, they need to be scared...scared for their lives. So they embark on a dangerous journey together to see if they can overcome their haunted pasts.

I really enjoyed this read, there is a huge plot twist that I just didn't see coming at all! I won't post any spoilers, as it really is best enjoyed going in blind.

The chapters are short and snappy, making it easy to plough through. I'm well over the age bracket for the target audience, but I loved it.

[Andrew Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good, at least for the first two thirds. I felt the story was complete at around the two thirds mark. The final third felt tacked on, with characters not really seen fully before and so it was difficult to care about them. Before that I was fully on board with Echo and Liv and was desperate for them to overcome their personal difficulties. There’s a big plot twist and Terry also name checks one of her earlier books, “an old favourite”. I’ll let you guess which book that was, its also one of my favourites… Netgalley ARC.

[Hannah Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this more than I thought I would! Initially I thought it was going to be a standard elusive teen love story with troubled souls but it became so much more than that! Some very clever planting of sub plots from an early stage made the twists towards the end very viable and surprising. I would have liked a bit more from some of the characters as some of them were a little one dimensional at times but overall a great shortlisted entry for the YTF awards!

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant YA novel!

[Kel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me. DNF.

[whatbooknext · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liv's sister has been by her side ever since she can remember. Molly is a comfort when Liv is upset, but she can be really annoying too, especially now they are older. Molly has caused a bit of upset along the way, as no one else knows she is there. Molly is Liv's twin who died just before she was born.

Living with their Mum, Liv and Molly keep their secret from her. Liv had to go to therapy for a while when she was younger. Admitting her imaginary friend was actually her dead twin didn't go down very well. Now she tries to keep Molly's presence secret. It's been hard though. Kids at school think Liv is a bit weird, so she doesn't have many friends. Her best friend is a boy called Bowie, and Molly thinks he's pretty nice.

Liv struggles to keep Bowie in the friend zone, especially with Molly pushing her constantly to kiss him. This causes some confusion to Bowie and makes things even more difficult for Liv. She wishes Molly would just let her live her life. Liv still visits Molly's grave every birthday however, and this is where she meets Echo.

He's tall, dressed in black with black eyeliner completing his 'goth' look. He's quiet but intense and drawn towards Liv as she speaks to her dead twin. He is on a mission to find answers to his mother's death and quickly feels that Liv can help him with that. She finds Echo intriguing and someone she doesn't have to share with Molly as her twin doesn't like Echo at all.

Echo and Liv spend hours together. Liv is half wary, half fascinated in Echo. Against Molly's warnings she soon agrees to help him in his mission to learn why his mother died. Echo believes the only way she can help him is if they make each other scared. Really scared. Scared enough to open a doorway to the other side.

Molly's warnings soon come true as Echo isn't who Liv thinks he is. It's only when she nearly dies that she takes Molly's warnings seriously, but it's almost too late. Both Molly and Echo's words were true and the world beyond opens for Liv. Only she can help a lost loved one and in the process help Echo at the same time.


Told in mainly two viewpoints, this ghostly thriller is a compelling read. It begins with a 16 year old girl with a huge secret - which is always great to pull in a reader. Liv's dead twin sister has been with her since birth. Their opposite personalities make great reading as they drive the plot and confuse other characters.

I enjoyed the authentic tension between 'bad boy' Echo and Liv and her confusion about her feelings for her best friend, the lovely Bowie. The ghost story theme is gripping as Echo and Liv push boundaries between life and death, and just when I think I know where the story is going, it morphs into an even more heart pounding serial killer thriller!

Surprising. Great read.

Age - 13+

[liz squires · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a good storyline, but badly written, grammatically in places it was awful, even my 11 year old said it was badly written; the unambitious nature of the language was at times frustrating, there are many ways to describe the chill up one’s spine or the throb of desire rather than simply repeating the word vibrate for every emotion passing through Liv’s body. There were some key opportunities where the author could have really created some tension and atmosphere - for example when Olly has hold of the group and is faced with police presence- but instead limited the imagination by short lifeless sentences that led nowhere, there could have been so much more done with that. There were some plot twists that I started to suspect quite early on but I did get fed up with the short chapters that actually gained nothing in the story. The author could have cut the book down by at least 5 chapters with all the unnecessary parts from Echo and Liv. I did fall in love with Bowie who is just generally a really sweet young man who wants the best for his friend first and foremost but clearly loves her very much and would actually do anything for her. He reminds me of a boy I went to school with and I thought of him every time Bowie had an interaction with Liv.
Molly started to irritate me and the descriptions of her character and the way she moved became repetitive and dull, there’s only so many times you can read that someone is “sat cross legged” or “swinging her legs”. There were, again, many opportunities here for the author to use engaging and challenging vocabulary to really bring the reader on but chose not to which was disappointing and the implication that Molly watched her mum have sex was a little disturbing and unnecessary. I’d recommend the book for an easy starter chapter book but not if I was hoping to bring a readers vocabulary and grammatical understanding on.

[Cherrybodt · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining ghost-story with all that needs to be part of it; mysteries, psychics and murder. One-third had me a bit bored though. As much as it is necessary to get to know the characters, most of the times I felt annoyed with the protagonist. She's pretty egoistical, more than just naive and has terrible priorities. This might be her 16-year old personality, but her decisions were a bit incomprehensible. The next third on the other hand had me indeed guessing and invested in the plot. Despite getting an idea of the plot-twist, it still felt rewarding when it happened. Terry managed to capture the sudden change in atmosphere pretty well and knew the reader was onto something and underlined it with her short and quick POV-changes.

Then came the last third. It wasn't bad, but highly underdeveloped. Infact it felt like that this was supposed to be plot all along or it came to Terry last minute and they implemented it quickly. It felt rushed, most of the times I couldn't follow the sudden location change and the reveal wasn't really shocking nor surprising. I'd have enjoyed it far more if the last bit had been the story all along. That way the whole arc in the beginnging wouldn't have felt as detached as it did. Also an emotional decision from the protagonist, Liv, didn't really work and felt wrongly timed. The whole premise of the book is really nice though, Liv and her struggle with the ghosts she meets along the way is great, I also enjoyed the quick support of her friends and family, where in other books it serves as an argument of disbelief. All in all a nice read, unfortunately with wrongly set priorities.

[Alyssia Cooke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scare Me is a relatively solid YA thriller with fantasy leanings, but more in the supernatural sense than in a magic system sense. Liv is - or was - a twin, but her sister didn't survive long beyond birth. To everyone else, she is a memory. To Liv however, Molly is a very real presence at her side almost every second of the day. And then Liv meets Echo, a strange goth boy with an obsession over seeing his mother once more, the mother who drove her car off a cliff. He believes the way to make this a reality is through fear. But in facing his fears, he drags Liv into a dangerous game.

Scare Me doesn't shy away from some uncomfortable topics; death being the most obvious. Liv lost her sister, Echo lost his mother. At the heart of Echo's need for answers is the question of whether his mother killed herself deliberately and if she meant to take him with her and there's a heart-breaking vulnerability to some of those passages. There's a creeping sense of dread that pervades through as the novel progresses and Liv is drawn into riskier and riskier actions, even as she knows it isn't the smart thing to do.

All in all, I enjoyed this. It's quite a quick read and has some strong characterisations and an interesting plot to it. Some of the side characters felt very one dimensional, but I liked the push pull of Liv and Molly's relationship, with Molly's need to interact with the world through Liv. Some of the writing felt a tad basic, but there were also some thought provoking and tense moments throughout. I'd certainly recommend for the target audience of teenagers and young adults.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my free review copy of this title.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure I concur with the blurb on the back that tells me this novel will "keep you guessing to the very end" since the major plot twist was obvious to me about halfway through, however I wouldn't go so far as to say that was a major retraction from the overall enjoyment of this book. A classic tale of teenage self-discovery and rebellion that just so happens to involve the ability to take to ghosts, but framed in an eerie supernatural thriller format. A quick read and fairly enjoyable, not something I would have read normally but my 3 year old pulled it off the shelf when we were grabbing children's books and it somehow came home with us - and I'm not very sorry it did. Might be a good holiday read. As a side note, I was a bit curious to see the image of the book cover in the app shows a slightly deformed eye (this is relevant to the plot) whereas the printed copy of the book doesn't have this distinctive festure.

[Marcus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was thoroughly enjoyable. I really like the shorter chapters and the different perspectives of the main characters. As with Teri Terry’s other books, I knew that this one was bound to be full of details and twists that make you question reality and I was right. The storyline took many interesting turns and kept me hooked all throughout. The ending, however, felt a bit rushed in my opinion. The first 2/3 of the book is used to set up the ending and the last 1/3 to flesh out all of the answers to the questions that had been building throughout the read. I did enjoy reading it, but I feel that more could have been done to make it truly feel finalized. That being said, overall it was a great read. I would read it again and I would recommend it to others.

[William Edmonds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this book. Although in my twenties, I still find YA fiction has a special charm and this book was no exception. Very real, well-developed characters and the pacing kept me wanting to read more with the short chapters. A great twist comes halfway through the book which feels like the story’s climax.
If the novel has one weakness, to me the ending felt a bit underwhelming. I was hoping for, expecting another twist that never came. Maybe a couple of the secondary characters like Rod and Tina could’ve been a little better developed too, but that’s a small weakness in a very enjoyable book. Thoroughly recommended!

[TM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scare Me" is a gripping psychological thriller centered around a 16-year-old girl who shares her life with the spirit of her deceased sister.

When she crosses paths with Echo, their journey takes a chilling turn as they delve into the mystery surrounding Echo's mother's death. Throughout their quest, they confront profound trauma and navigate through a series of spine-tingling and suspenseful encounters.

While I won't reveal any spoilers, the novel's conclusion, while satisfying, may leave you pondering alternative outcomes.

It's definitely a compelling read, and I highly recommend giving it a chance.

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teri Terry has been one of my favourite authors for a long time now, so I was a bit worried after not really liking the first half of this novel because of Echo and Molly's perspectives. However, the second half really turned things around to where I couldn't stop reading and simply had to reach the end with all the conclusions it entailed.

Additionally - it bothers me that the cover on Goodreads in not the "correct" one; I really don't like that one eye is upside down and it's not how my edition looks.

[Nolwenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was actually really good.

The twist with Echo was quite touching. I do feel that the book could have been two books, the ending felt kind of rushed but i liked how it all tied up together beautifully.

Overall a great book, one little star off just because it could have been a more detailed ending.
But to be fair this is a YA book and it read as such.

I got this book from a blind draw, and I’m happy that I did :).

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read by this author and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a YA about a young woman who is struggling with her relationship with her mother as well as that with her dead twin.

It's a slow read at times, but, a good ghostly tale with well drawn characters.

Thanks to NetGalley and Hatchette publishers for the opportunity to preview.

[Steph Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much
I loved Echo and Liv's storylines
I loved each twist and the ending! AHH!
The ending of this was amazing
Finding out Oliver was unaliving people, and all to find girls who were like his ex-lover
Liv freeing Molly made me wanna cry!
This book was fantastic it's my favourite read of this year!

[Grace Vickers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this book. Finished it in a day and it was fast paced and interesting. There was nothing wrong with it, it was a good Ya model. But not too complex or anything , good for what it was

[April Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing read by one of my favourite YA suspense authors. Loved this ghostly story and the characters and their relationships were done really well, even if I did see the big twist coming 😂

[Myrthe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story started okay, but I felt that the last 25-35% was unnecessary and dragging on. I just wasn’t convinced and in the end I was happy I finished it so I could read something else :)

[Alice Visser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting YA with ghosts woven in as realistic characters. Will be popular with young readers with its teen perspectives with a creepy twist

[Eleanor Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75🌟

[Larissa Storey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up!
I wish that the ending had a bit more information as it was basically just a point form of what happened, but the story was very interesting and fast paced!

[Sophia (Soph) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teri Terry will always be an auto buy author for me and this book was everything.

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5⭐️

A very fun read that had me hooked from the start! Those twists and turns kept me guessing the entire way through

[awin · Rating 1 out of 5]

meh, it was definitely echos long hair and mollys whiny ass that put me off. free bowie from that mess

[Rae's Reading Corner · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Being with him made me feel more alive than I ever have before."

Thank you so much to the publishers for providing me with an eArc of this book in exchange for my honest review. Hearing that this book was set in Brighton, I was immediately intrigued and then reading the blurb made me know I wanted to read it ASAP!

I haven't read one of Teri Terry's books since I was younger, so to see how far she has come now, and how brilliant her writing still is, made me so happy. This was such a good book that draws you in and keeps you wanting more.

Like Liv, I was drawn to Echo and wanted to know more about him. At first, I didn't like Molly. I thought she was controlling and wasn't letting Liv live her life in her own way. But over time she grew on me. I suppose since I never had a sister that affected how I first saw their relationship.

Overall this was a slow read for me. It was still insanely good but at times it was really easy to put down and forget about. But as soon as I picked it back up I would be drawn in again. I genuinely did not expect how some things went down and it made it even more exciting and mind-blowing to read.

This book is a perfect YA story for lovers of ghosts and mysteries.

Echo is determined to talk to his mother one last time, to know the truth behind her death. But will he be able to succeed? Can Liv truly help him? In the end, what will it cost?

Once again a huge thank you to the publishers for providing me with the arc!

[Beth Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terri Terry moves away from Sci Fi trilogies for this fabulous paranormal thriller that somehow I only found out about last week browsing Netgalley?! 😱 And there was I worried that I wouldn't get a birthday Teri treat this year (ok it's two weeks early but I'm claiming it).

Scare Me is the story of Liv a teenager haunted by the twin she killed in utero, Echo, a boy looking for answers about his mother's death, Liv's not-but- sort-of boyfriend Bowie and the abduction case they're all tangled up in.

To say more would be to give spoilers but even though I'd guessed at the big twist half way through the book continues to deliver as Liv has to deal with the ramifications of everything that's happened and the abduction case.

This is a fabulous gripping read and Teri keeps building the tension through each of Liv's encounters with the dead. This is one to read beside the campfire this summer!

[Mia Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The relationship between Liv and Molly was so amazing and sad and even a year after reading, I remember it clear as day. That was one thing about this book. I'm writing this review so long after reading, but all I had to do was google Liv and Echo's names and everything came back to me. I know that sounds crazy, but it was genuinely like a rush of images i'd come up with during the book.